Venture Without Gain
by inkvoices
Summary: There are eight other people on board Serenity other than Jayne and seven he wouldn't mind doing a bit of bunk-sharing with.


**Disclaimer: **Firefly/Sernity belongs to Joss Whedon.

**Warnings:** mild swearing, blunt language and talk of sex. Basically, this story contains Jayne.

**Spoilers:** all Firefly episodes and Serenity (the film)

**Summary:** There are eight other people on board Serenity besides Jayne and seven he wouldn't mind doing a bit of bunk-sharing with.

**Author Note:** for sugar-fey, she who pulled me into the fandom and gave me bunnies.

* * *

Venture Without Gain

Jayne walks onto the bridge and there's a pair of legs in a pilot's jumpsuit trousers sticking out from under the main flight console. He assumes they belong to the pilot, and that's who the Captain told him to come and speak to, so he crouches down and grabs the top of the guy's thigh with one large hand and tugs the leg towards him. One strong pull and a couple of yanks drags out a blond-haired, pasty-faced and protesting man.

"You the pilot?" Jayne asks.

"Wash."

"I don't stink much."

"_I'm _Wash." He presses his palms flat against the metal deck and pushes himself up into a sitting position. "I'm the pilot, and you are…?"

Jayne follows his eyes to where they're staring: at Jayne's hand still wrapped around his thigh and brushing against something else that's risen to half mast.

"Bunk?" asks Jayne.

"Married!"

Jayne lifts his hand from the pilot's leg to scratch at his head. "Captain said you'd show me the spare bunk."

"Oh! Can do, can do! Just won't share it with you. There will be no sharing of bunks, because I'm married. Also, not sly." The pilot jumps up with a wide, white grin and Jayne follows.

* * *

Jayne figures that Wash must be married to the other blond on the ship. Him and the little mechanic are both perky and shiny and engine-loving, seems like they'd fit together hand in glove, which leaves the other woman on board up for grabs – and Jayne isn't complaining at that. 

Dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, large lips and a great ass on her. The gun strapped to her leg highlights the curve of her thigh.

He's passing her in the cargo bay when he makes his move, reaching out and stroking along the edge of the tit closest to him, firm but gentle, and looking down at her with the sexiest grin he can manage.

It's not two seconds before she twists away and around and flings out a booted foot that hits him rather hard in a place no man ought to be hit.

"That was a no," she tells him.

"Ugn," Jayne replies, and "ngh" and eventually, "show me t'do that?"

She looks him up and down, like he was cattle, and asks him if he wants to spar.

"Might as well," he says, grinning again, but feral this time. "It's not like I'm usin' the energy for anythin' else."

* * *

Wash is married to _that _one, as it turns out, so Jayne turns his eye to the perky piece with a shrug. Tits are tits and he's never met a pair he didn't like. This pair might come with a streak of grease by the looks of it, but that can only make things slide along a little easier. 

When he looks up from the tits he sees she has a nice smile, one that she always seems to be using. He follows it into the engine room one day, showing some interest in what interests her, and those pretty lips part to tell him all about redux flow and buck coils, steel ring hinge hooks, bent tri-lids and regular 510.3's.

He ends up following that smile _out_ of the engine room as well, bemused, just about in time for some food, without getting 'round to putting even a finger against a nipple.

He doesn't bother trying to follow it again, but now and then he still likes to admire it, just away from anywhere in the ship that might provoke an onslaught of techno babble.

* * *

It's after a heist, with the blood and the adrenalin running through him fast and powerful, when he looks at the Captain and Mal's wearing the mirror of the grin Jayne himself has.Jayne grins some more and thinks why not? 

"You wanna work off some energy, Mal?" he asks.

"What? Sparing _now_?"

"You afraid of a few bruises?" Jayne brings himself, his grin and his flexing muscles right up into Mal's personal space, close enough to brush stubble against Mal's forehead if he moves just a pistol-barrel length nearer.

Mal jumps a few good pistol-barrel lengths back.

"What the _guay_ are you playing at?"

"Nothin'," says Jayne with a shrug.

"I ain't payin' you to do nothin'," Mal says as he strides off.

* * *

When Inara Serra hires one of Serenity's shuttles, Jayne knows before he meets her that he hasn't got a chance in this or any 'verse of touching her. Companions don't spend time with the likes of Jayne Cobb, never mind _private _time, not even if the likes of him ever manage to get that kind of credit, but Jayne's never been one to pass up an opportunity. 

The worst she can do is say no, and that's not the worst a woman has ever said to him. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

She's standing a bare foot away from him, and she's beautiful and then some. He keeps his eyes on her face and away from her tits, trying to act like the men she's used to.

He looks at her and opens his mouth and she says, "I'm not going to have sex with you."

He closes his mouth, shrugs, turns and walks away.

* * *

Jayne sees the rich man at the table, a doctor of all things, and Kaylee's shiny smile fixed on his pale, pointy face. He sees the guy's long fingers and graceful, surgeon's hands and he can think of better uses for those things than being wrapped around _gos se_ cutlery. 

It's planets and jobs later, and after they've gotten rid of the doctor and his creepy sister and then they're back, then repeat – he loses track - before he presses his mouth against a pale ear and whispers what he thinks those hands could do.

"I'm sorry," says Simon, backing away so he can stare up at Jayne. "Did you just… What you are saying, in actual fact – and do please correct me if I'm wrong – is that you want sex? With me?" He blinks. "I can't believe I actually just asked you that. I can't believe _you're _asking me that! Correct me!"

Jayne thinks that means 'no'.

* * *

He's feeling repressed and he thinks the preacher man might be as well. 

Stands to reason a Shepard would be a mite repressed, what with religious folks never getting any, but then Brook knows things no Shepard ought to. For one thing, Jayne's seen him handle a gun as easy as breathing. If he isn't a Shepard then he shouldn't object to Jayne asking about him maybe sharing a bunk sometime, and if he _is _a Shepard then he hasn't been one forever, meaning there's still a chance at that bunk-sharing.

He tries to be subtle and lead up to the suggestion. It's going well, they're both smiling and laughing, and Jayne thinks Brook might be getting a little snug in the trouser department even.

Then the crazy girl pulls another of her stunts. He doesn't know how she got hold of one of his guns, and he's not sure he really _wants _to know, but she's got Mal angry at him again and she's no good for anything other than that.

He takes the weapon back to his bunk, which is a different kind of bunk-sharing than he'd had in mind, but then sex with a Shepard would probably have sent him to the Special Hell anyway.

He can live without that.

* * *

Things happen, things blow up, people die. 

Jayne sits at the dining room table and lays out all his weapons in front of him, little to large. There's blood stains where a Reaver got too _shee-niou _close to Inara, who was holding it, engine grease coating the one lent to Kaylee and nicks on a few more. It's quiet for the first time in a while and he's paying some attention to his life-savers-life-takers, with Vera waiting patiently for some extra special loving at the last.

"It's not right," says a confused voice and he looks up to see River standing in the doorway directly in front of him.

The girl's crazy, he knows that. He also knows she could swipe one of the weapons off this table and gun him down in seconds if she wanted to. Hell, she could break him with her bare hands. Mal thinks she won't try anything, but Jayne's been beat and cut by this one and thinks maybe he's the exception.

"Above the engine, looking down at the way the world moves," she tells him, in that creepifying tone and his fingers twitch towards the trigger of the piece he's polishing.

"I felt it here." She places one hand on her right temple then trails it across her forehead and down to rest it between her breasts. "Warm and soft and hard and strange sounds."

"That's nice," Jayne says carefully. "Now go away?"

"It's not right," she says again. "Supposed to feel it from here." She drags the hand between her breasts down until she's resting her palm against her sex - pulling her pretty dress tight across her front so he has to change 'breasts' to 'tits' inside his head, and Jayne has never met a pair of tits he hasn't liked – before dragging it back up to rest between her tits again.

"Should be body to heart, not head to heart. She feels, but not feeling."

Jayne thinks, very carefully, about what's going on here: he's in a room full of guns with a crazy girl who's feeling herself up in front of him. He thinks he might be being offered sex, but this is not someone he wants to hear it from. Ever. Even if she does have nice tits.

"Go away?" he tries again, mouth dry.

She looks at him, head to one side so her long hair nearly touches the floor, one hand still over her heart. "I won't take your guns and I won't make you do anything you don't want to do with me." She smiles. "And I'll try very hard not to crash the ship."

"You do that." _Away from me_, he adds, silently.

She smiles again and walks past him to the bridge and he thinks that she knows.

Everything.

* * *

**Translations: **_guay _is hell, _go se _iscrap, _shee-niou _is cow sucking, according to www. browncoats. net (without the spaces) 

**Final A/N: **This is my first peice of fanfiction in this fandom (which I'm telling you at the end so I don't put you off before you've read it), so I'd really appreciate any and all feedback. :o)


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